Sunday updates – Codethecity Health

Great progress overnight and through the morning. Very few drop outs overnight – keeping a real energy in the room.

Float your boat

The team have created a prototype website focusing on helping people find events and services locally. Includes stories about people improving their lives through accessing services.

Currently acting as a central hub for finding further information.

Have discussed turning it into an app, but clearly a web first approach seems the most appropriate at this stage. Discussion about the potential for local community ownership, or for a body like Health Partnership Development to take the lead.

A key observation was that the scope of ambition for the project has jumped from very ambitious and broad, to much tighter, and back again multiple times. Deciding on the scope to tackle took significant time, and was acknowledged as key to making progress.

Worth noting that the team is treating the sourcing and management of high quality data to be a parallel problem, likely tackled elsewhere.

Friends Tree

The team has a paper prototype app aiming to guide people towards independently finding a way to take part in the local community.

Similar to the Float’ project, but focussed more tightly on social isolation issues and solutions.

They have been looking at the scoring, rating and categorisation of services and activities to aid in selection and guide people towards appropriate choices.

This team agreed with the importance of selecting a specific objective for the project – and to focus on that. Very easy to get distracted by related issues.

The unique element identified in the group discussion was the potential to allow the creation of some small groups. A fascinating example was the creation of a ‘take the bins out’ agreement among neighbours – helping people find help if they are away from home, and easing a ‘first contact’ event with new neighbours when you move home.

Delta Test

While the team ‘have nothing fancy to show’ they have made substantial progress since the last update, and are confident of having a well progressed project by the end of the day. Work has progressed on three fronts:

Data collection and insertion to new database.

Reporting layer, where work if focussed on generating mean values for overview presentation.

The Geo team have been translating postcodes into coordinates, and creating workflows and automation to allow this to happen as time goes on when new data and boundary changes happen.

An interesting discussion about availability of data about GP practices, (there is more than you might think, much of which can be reviewed here) and what can be done with it.

Pomoc

The language barrier project has focussed on refining the story told in the video and literature that it is creating. The discussion touched on the existing use of mobile phones as a primary translation tool for many people with English as a second language, especially when confronted with technical or medical terms.

Also discussed options to not only offer better translation access, but to offer language skills development services as a preferred approach.

Team text

This team have met a couple of technical barriers when tying their various elements together, but have achieved a number of key elements.

SMS messages are being relayed successfully.

A prototype of the service has been created in Java to simulate the interaction, on screen for now rather than by SMS.

Discussion has been primarily around the importance of marketing and communications around the service. Targeting of publicity thought to centre on food banks, shelters, pubs, chemists, community centres – all places with high footfall from the demographic groups the service would be most appropriate for.

The wider group identified this as a key tool in self management of long term issues, and something that would have a genuine impact.

Data visualisation

Finally, a demonstration of some visualisation options using off the shelf visualisation tools to gain insights into the quality, coverage and usefulness of a data set.